


Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

by nimmieamee



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 16:02:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8673706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: This subtly reminded Ronan that, for the most part, up until the Lynch brothers had made peace, Declan had taken on the work left by Niall Lynch alone. It was the kind of realization Ronan would have doused in kerosene and set aflame rather than look at, had this been two years ago. But now when Declan's sellers demanded something too unique for their father to have dreamt up, Ronan would produce it instead. Ronan had the house, the fields, the dreams, and the dreaming. Declan had the more dangerous legacy. It was unfair in a way that couldn't be fixed by setting things aflame. And the Lynches would always save each other if they had to.(Ronan, 2 years after TRK.)





	

Time went as fast or as slow as Ronan wanted it to at the Barns. 

Now, when it was nearly summer, he hurried the days along. There were animals to feed, cars to drive, supplies to take up to the shelter near Durbin. Opal to exercise, Chainsaw to scold, floors to replace and endless, endless things to dream.

He was working on chickens. Blue feathers on their legs. 

Two things woke him before he could make this a reality: one, Opal talking back to the radio. The radio spoke English. Opal loudly disagreed with whatever it was trying to tell her in a language that precisely nothing else in the waking world spoke, particularly not the radio. 

The other thing that woke him was the phone. Not Ronan's cell phone. The one in the living room, with its coiling light wires that weren't connected to anything. It only took calls from two people, and this time it wouldn't be Adam because Adam was taking a biology exam.

"Bro," Declan said, when Ronan picked up. "I. Am. Working now. I need you to answer before the fortieth ring."

"Whatever, shitlord," Ronan said kindly. "I was sleeping."

He shifted aside a box of glowing pears with his foot and then hooked the foot around a gemstone-studded chair in order to draw the chair closer. Then he sat and made a motion to Opal to lower the radio in the next room. Opal stood up and closed the door instead, which gave him the quiet he wanted without actually giving him what he'd asked for. 

Declan was sighing. It was a long sigh. Ronan waited until he was done. The Lynch brothers were rarely easy with each other but neither were they now engaged in total war. So Declan would measure out his words carefully. Declan liked to match his words to every occasion. So did Ronan these days, but Ronan selected from a library of retorts and swears. Declan, ever Ronan mirrored, preferred to keep his language a little cleaner.

"We have a problem. I thought you could help me solve it," he said.

The _we_ was him and Ronan. The asking Ronan to help was new -- Declan never would have two years ago. This subtly reminded Ronan that, for the most part, up until the Lynch brothers had made peace, Declan had taken on the work left by Niall Lynch alone.

It was the kind of realization Ronan would have doused in kerosene and set aflame rather than look at, had this been two years ago. But now when Declan's sellers demanded something too unique for their father to have dreamt up, Ronan would produce it instead. Ronan had the house, the fields, the dreams, and the dreaming. Declan had the more dangerous legacy. It was unfair in a way that couldn't be fixed by setting things aflame. And the Lynches would always save each other if they had to.

"Which one is it?" Ronan asked flatly.

"That's the thing," Declan said. "Laumonier's not buying anymore."

That wasn't a problem. That was the opposite of a problem. Chainsaw hopped in from the hallway and eyed the glowing pears and Ronan, who was worried about what they might do to her digestion, said, "Fuck off, sphincter," and made shooing motions until she hopped away, dignity and feathers ruffled. 

"I'm serious," Declan was saying. "And I don't think it's a good sign. If they're not buying from us, they're just buying from somebody else. But Seondeok still wants stuff from us. I feel like -- like they lost us to her in a battle."

Ronan's days held no battles and he had little interest in the ones being waged beyond the confines of the Barns. He was hurrying the time. He raised cows and pigs and sheep and lately goats. He put in new floors and designed new furniture, built treehouses and installed hopeful chicken pens. He'd filled the back field with so many cars that there was no space to drive around in circles anymore, and then he'd gone to sleep and carved a new field out of the mountainside.

"And she's getting particular," Declan said. "She wants an object that will protect against want."

"Want? What want?" 

"Just the concept of want," Declan said. "Just the concept."

It was a flimsy request, protection against an idea. This had become typical. Niall Lynch's beautiful creations no longer commanded any attention on the magical artifacts market. Sellers wanted objects to buy more time, to confuse and discourage, to defend, to make them invulnerable. Weapons. Ronan suspected that Declan had put it out to them that the Lynches had nothing outright destructive to offer. Ronan kept expecting calls about bombs and guns, but they never came. Declan was intercepting them. 

"I'll do it," Ronan said.

"I'm not sure you should. The more we give them, the more they ask for," Declan said. "When does it stop?"

"I said I'd do it," Ronan said. "How's Matthew?"

Matthew had recovered slowly from his near-destruction. Ronan and Opal had recovered pretty slowly, too, but Ronan was a dreamer and Opal was a psychopomp or something, but Matthew was only a half-thought, beloved thing. Some days his fingers didn't work right. Other days, his eyes. He handled this with his customary cheer, but both of his brothers were shaken. Ronan wasn't infallible, not any more than Niall had been, and no matter what Declan's buyers thought, he couldn't make indestructible things. There were ways around Ronan's dreaming.

But now Declan said, "He's fine. St. Albans voted him class speaker."

"Jesus Mary," Ronan said, though Matthew had always been popular. 

Then the conversation stalled. The stall had shape and form, a glittering name neither brother wanted to say first. Matthew always made them think of the same person. Ronan hadn't wanted to take down any of the pictures of his mother, but for months he hadn't been able to really look at them. Losing Niall had been a shot to the head, sudden and near-impossible to make his way back from. Losing Aurora had hurt in a different way, less a wound that was supposed to be mortal and inexplicably wasn't, more like a nail scraping his eyeball, or a knife cutting up his tongue. He could survive it, but for a good few months or so his senses hadn't worked right.

"Mom would be proud," Declan said now.

"Yeah," Ronan said.

He would have said worse, but he had the house, the fields, the dreams, and the dreaming; and the only thing he really shared with Declan was the fact of their orphanhood. He'd told Declan once how Aurora had asked after him, in the weeks before she'd died. Declan had gone cold and cruel and hung up, hadn't called back for months. 

Sometimes he wasn't Ronan's mirror. He was a Niall knockoff, and Ronan had been too, until suddenly Ronan had his home back and his fields and his animals and seasonal visits from Adam Parrish, and didn't want to be like that at all.

"Well, let me know when you have it and I'll drive down," Declan said. "Later, bro. Happy dreams."

Declan hung up and so did Ronan, and then Chainsaw skittered around the edge of the door, still eyeing the pears. Ronan shooed her and locked them in one of the hallway cabinets. Then he checked on Opal, who was still babbling furiously at the radio.

"English," he said.

She said, "When's Adam coming?"

"I told you. When he's done with exams." 

"Not soon enough."

"That's not my fault. I'm hurrying the time."

"Where are the chickens?"

"The phone woke me up too soon. So did your tree-monologue."

"Omnis traductor traditor," she said.

" _English_ ," he said.

"Omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina."

"Stop dicking around. Come on."

He went to get his boots and heard her clatter after him a few moments later. She'd left the radio on, but as soon as they were outside the sound dropped away, replaced with cricketsong and bird chatter. The fields around them teemed. Cows and deer grazed together. Sheep baa-ed amiably at napping hedgehogs. Chipmunks and raccoons peered around the edges of the goat pen. Opal chased a golden marsh rabbit before galloping back Ronan's way, and when she did the rabbit hopped after her, glad to reverse the game. Owls hooted from the plum trees. These were babies. Ronan had just dreamed them. He hoisted himself halfway along the branches until he found the nest and then whistled for Opal, who was already digging for worms. She popped one in her mouth and handed the rest to Ronan.

"That's gross as shit," Ronan told her, dropping a worm in each frantic beak. He jumped down from the tree before he had to watch them digest. Opal's marsh rabbit danced around his legs, so he fed it the last worm. It was a dream rabbit and it ate whatever Opal did, which was everything. 

Declan would need the item soon. Seondeok always wanted things A S A P. But Ronan had been sleeping for much of the morning, dreaming and discarding various chicken breeds, and so now he wasn't tired. Luckily, there was slop to mix and feed to set out at all the various fields, so he and Opal made the rounds, down paths lined with mushrooms as tall as houses and bushes that grew lightbulbs and trees with glowing roots that offered pre-made lunchboxes. Ronan had managed to coax a family of grey foxes to come visit the Western edge of the property, so after the farm's animals had been fed and tended to he steered Opal in that direction. For an hour or so they laid in the grass and watched his two dream-foxes, which were a luminous taupe, lead the wilder pack away to the woods to feed. Ronan tolerated carnivores, but only within limits. 

He thought Adam might like the foxes, though. They'd been gaunt and starving when Ronan had found them. Now they looked better, fatter and healthier.

"When's he coming?" Opal said eventually, rolling around on the grass and clutching her marsh rabbit. "When?"

"I told you," Ronan said, standing and dusting off his jeans. "He has exams. He can't come until he's done."

But the chattering, urgent way she asked the question cut through to Ronan. It mirrored the frenzy inside him. If he shook out his heart, then there it was. There was the restless echo of Adam. Ronan didn't need him to stay. He had every dream he'd ever wanted. But dreaming alone was a lazy pleasure. Dreaming shared with Adam was fast, momentous, marvelous, like pulling back a corner of the sky and letting Adam spot patterns in the hollows made by stars.

"Biology," he reminded Opal now. "That's done today. Then psychology. General chem. English. Engineering he took already -- that was Monday."

But they both knew none of Adam's subjects had any meaning for Opal beyond the fact that they kept Adam away longer. The outside world was like that, both fantastical and very uninteresting. There were few reasons for Ronan and Opal to visit that world. When it wasn't too hot for boots Opal sometimes came with Ronan to the domestic violence shelter out in Durbin, but Ronan was just as often accompanied by a wayward frog or a spotted goat, and he was only ever out there because Adam had spent a summer working there, and would have wanted Ronan to slide in and offer help, too. 

When they made it back to the house, his cell phone was vibrating on the kitchen table. It was the intermittent, sometime-buzz of a text gone long unanswered. That was what Ronan got for charging it. 

"When's he coming?" Opal sang, jumping up the stairs two at a time with a clatter of hooves, letting her marsh rabbit slip out of her fingers and out the door. "When's he coming?"

But Adam knew to call the other line. This buzz was Gansey, who'd written punctual, long emails every week without fail; who left longer voice messages that were mostly about Blue and Henry. Who Ronan kept forgetting to connect to the other line. It didn't seem urgent. What he and Gansey had was iron. It had held up through the unfamiliar and the frightening, and Ronan didn't think a little time would do it in. Pulling out a chair, he sat down and scrawled through Gansey's texts. Adam would not be here until late May, but Gansey would be here sooner. 

Over the next few days, time hurried faster. He prepared a guest room and then, remembering Cheng, doubled back and halfheartedly cleaned out another. He put up fences along the edge of the property and dreamed a pool behind the house, laid with flat blue stones and filled with clear, eternally-clean water. Then he dreamt two orange-velvet fish to please Gansey and sing notes of warning when Opal got too close. She still couldn't really swim. 

They pitched hay and picked peaches, planted nutcracker-soldier seeds that would blossom in time for Christmas, built a large bird exercise gym for Chainsaw to ignore and the sparrows to chirp at enviously. Every night he tried to make something that could guard against want -- just the concept of _want_ \-- but it didn't come right until the night before Gansey and the others were due. 

Ronan slipped into dreams and found himself in Monmouth Manufacturing. Lately his dreams were placid things, and this one was no different, not marked by excessive emotion. Just a dream. He'd never hated Monmouth. It just hadn't been home. The high-ceilinged room he'd occupied had therefore carried the stamp of want, of close-enough but not good enough. He put his hand on the door handle and found something there, black and leathery. His bands. He didn't wear them these days. Opal and the goats couldn't keep from nibbling them. But he closed his hand on these and thought of how slipping them on, making them real, would let him wake up. Then he would be home again, and free of want.

He slipped them on. He made them real. He woke. When he looked at the bands they had a sequin gleam that the originals had never had. He didn't miss Adam. His head was too full of the promise of Adam coming, and the promise crowded out the want. He didn't miss Gansey. He didn't miss or want anything. 

He heard Blue's shout and the odd, satisfying engine sound that was all sound, no engine necessary.

It was summer, and they were here. When he slipped off his bands he missed Adam again, but the promise of Adam arriving late in the month was still good enough to taste.

Opal's hooves beat a rhythm on the floors as she clattered down the hall.

"I know," he said, when he opened the door to greet her. "They're here. You're late to the game."

"What about Adam?" she demanded, but she demanded it in Latin to be a brat, so he didn't give her an answer. Downstairs, Gansey was already knocking, brisk, polite, perfectly aware that he could just walk in if he chose. He didn't. He was still waiting just beyond the screen when Ronan walked downstairs, calling out, "Get in here--"

He waited a beat, watched as Gansey undid the latch.

"--maggot."

Gansey paused. Blue snuck in under his arm. She glowed, something lustrous in her expression. Her hair was longer and great unexpected quantities of her were pierced and her right shoulder was tattooed. Ronan hugged her and brushed the leaf-pattern with his knuckles gently.

"Nice ink."

"You barely write, you asshole. You think sending us some pictures of sheep and giant mushroom forests is enough?"

"I express myself through art. I failed English."

"You mean you gave up before you could pass English."

"Way to pick on a high school dropout, Sargent. Snob. You're still short, by the way."

"That's your insult? That's weak," she said, dropping her head back to stare at him fully. "I didn't know they stacked shit as high as you."

Ronan gave a low whistle of happy agreement.

Gansey was still paused on the step, but Henry Cheng had managed to blow in on the wind. He was still eighty-five percent hair product. Ronan didn't often shake hands and as a rule he smiled only sparingly, so he offered Henry a nod. Henry said, "Nice beard. Very American gothic."

"There aren't any beards in American gothic," Ronan said.

"All farmer things feel kind of the same to me," Henry admitted, moving in a pair of monogrammed scarlet duffels that were too expensive to be destroyed by a year of mere roadtripping. "I liked the mushrooms, though. Potentially illegal farming feels like your style."

Ronan shrugged.

"Your room's third on the left upstairs," he said, mostly to get Henry out of the way so he could talk to Gansey and Blue. Henry had been present at a very crucial moment in Ronan's life, but Ronan had never been able to understand what kinds of concrete benefits he offered on a day-to-day basis. He wasn't quite a friend. He was just the vague promise of one, less a person than a walking wishbone.

Gansey cleared his throat.

"We'll only need the one room," he said. "For the three of us, I mean."

For a moment, Ronan was blindsided. Unlike Blue, Gansey didn't look any different. His shirt was blindingly teal and his teeth blindingly white, his jaw heroically excellent and his wristwatch a museum piece. But he felt like a fork in the road, potentially diverging before Ronan's eyes.

"I hope things have been good with Adam," he said carefully.

"You'll see him in a few days," Ronan said. "How have you been, man?"

Gansey relaxed and came in. Iron. This wouldn't break. Ronan pulled him in and hugged him briefly. Gansey relaxed out of it with a hand on Ronan's elbow, offering casual guidance even after a year spent apart. Ronan shook it off gently. There was nowhere he could be guided. He was home.

"You're going to lose your shit at my mushrooms."

"I came to see you, not trip acid."

"Hey, that's your loss," Ronan said, though he didn't use the mushrooms for that. They made decent feed, that was all. He helped Gansey and Blue bring in their duffels as Cheng came back downstairs, Opal on his heels. She shot Ronan an extremely disappointed look that said, _this is not Adam_ , and that somehow managed to say it in magical tree language. Ronan shrugged. He couldn't help that. 

Adam wouldn't arrive for another week. But there was so much to tour, after a year spent remaking the property, that the time kept hurrying along. There were horses to introduce and light-flower-bushes to trim, hamburger-trees to pick and cars to race in the back field. There were the things Henry and Blue and Gansey excitedly demanded explanations for: vines that grew work boots, ponds full of musical sea-grasses, Opal's white cart with its two oversized slugs to pull it.

Time was suddenly, marvelously _fast_. Ronan hadn't even realized he'd missed that. Everything at the Barns was so hazy and comfortable that to get things to move fast again, he needed to chase the fastness, to create demands, to give in to missing Adam.

"How is he?" Gansey asked, the night before Adam was due to arrive. Henry and Blue were supervising Opal as she drifted across the pond on the back of a large purple tortoise. Ronan had told her this was a bad idea, and her response had been merely to recruit a pair of assistants as difficult and uncompromising as she was. 

"It'll be good to see him," Gansey continued. "He promised to help move me into my dorm."

"Dorm?" Ronan said, cocking an eyebrow.

Gansey nodded briskly. "I know. Maybe not dorm. Property's a better investment."

"Right," Ronan said. "Then you sell like you sold Monmouth."

For a second Gansey's relax slipped and slipping meant solidifying into that other Gansey, regal and controlled. Ronan noticed, because Ronan knew him. But Ronan didn't know why the sale of Monmouth should strike such a nerve. Gansey and Monmouth were not like Ronan and the Barns. Gansey could make any place his kingdom.

"It means a lot," Gansey said, Gansey-regal atop Gansey-normal. "He's changed. Grown stronger. So have you."

"Aw," Ronan said, putting a hand over his heart. "Thanks. We really needed you to tell us that."

Opal gave a shriek somewhere beyond them. She was slipping off the turtle, and Henry had to wade in to keep her from falling off. Ronan heard him loudly offering to teach her how to swim. Henry couldn't seem to grasp the concept of hooves. 

When Ronan turned back to Gansey, Gansey was frowning at the can in his hand, beer Ronan had offered and he hadn't touched.

"I worried he would hurt you," he told Ronan abruptly. "When he told me that this -- this between you could happen."

Ronan took a sip of his beer and shrugged. Gansey could reflect his own anxieties about Adam anywhere. If Gansey and Ronan were iron, then Gansey and Adam were slippery as mercury. The jealous parts of Ronan had always felt deeply satisfied by this, but now he mostly found it pointless. He didn't want his relationship with Adam to mean anxiety for Gansey. It wasn't meant to be used that way; it had nothing to do with Gansey at all.

"He hasn't hurt me yet, but thanks, mom," Ronan said, taking a swig of his beer. "If he does, not sure what you could do about it."

"I want to swim well!" Opal said suddenly, loudly. "I want to take biology so I can swim!"

Then she said it three more times in Latin.

Ronan rolled his eyes. 

"English, asshole." 

He stood. Obviously it was time to get her out of the water.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally part of a much longer fic, and after cutting it short it leaves me with a Ronan who I think still has some growing to do. Grown some. Still has a lot of growing to do. 
> 
> That said, if you want Ronan having lots of downtime at the Barns, then I think this works as a standalone slice-of-life thing.


End file.
